Net.Weirdness: Groovy Graphics, Hacking and Phreaking

This really is a smorgasbord of weird links. This time, we'll check out groovy graphics, and more hacking and phreaking-focused links.

Groovy Graphics, Man

AcidWarp Trippy Screen Display
FTP: ftp.rahul.net (still online and open to the public!)
Directory: (Not there, sorry)
"Whoaaaaahhhhhhh Dude! It's like being blotto on blotter without the two-day hangover. Played on thousands of screens in thousands of dorm rooms while thousands of minds turn to Jell-O™."
Archived? Better than that, upgraded! As captured and documented by Eyecandy Archive (tagline: "Turn your computer into an expensive lava lamp"), which also links to a half-hour HD (1920x1080) YouTube video:

Fractal Picture Archive
FTP
"Mandelbrot masturbation. Pretty pictures already rendered for the computationally-challenged."
Still online? No, this archive of alt.fractals.pictures is not still online, but Flickr (founded in 2004) has a decent collection with the fractals tag, and Deviantart (launched in 2000) has a collection in the fractals topic.


Hacking/Phreaking

H/P WWW Site
WWW
"A glimpse of the dark side of the Web. FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY! (yeah, right)."
Still online? No, and not archived, or even remembered!
Anything like it? So much. So very much. But let's continue.

Cult of the Dead Cow
FTPs
"These dOOdZ are dangerous! Hundreds of incredibly witty, well-written files covering everything from simple social engineering to truly wizardlike techno spoofing."
Still online? The FTP is offline, but cDc lives on with what is currently a super low bandwith landing page (ASCii!)

Phrack
E-mail and FTPs
"Phrack—what Net. Spider can be without a passing knowledge of Phrack"? The grand pappy of hacker/cracker/phreaker pubs."
Still online? The FTP links are dead, but Phrack lives on! With more ASCii, too. And the archives are basic directories of text files and tgz archives.

Surfpunk Technical Journal
Mailing List
"The 'dangerous multi-national hacker zine' is a great resource (and it's not afraid to laugh at itself). Fun and informative."
Still remembered? Yes, in an archive of WIRED from 1994, when it was much closer to the bleeding edge.

Net.Weirdness: Games/Hints/Cheats/Cracks and Generally Weird Stuff

Time for some wicked thrills! That's right, it's 1995 and you can read about video games online! Even get hints and cheats for free! But beware, they'll probably turn you into a cold-blooded killer.

Games/Hints/Cheats/Cracks

FTP sites
"Why beat your head against the screen in your quest to find out how to get past that next level? The answers are here, homey! Hints, cheats, cracks, you name it."
Still online? Ho-leey shee-it, YES! ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/doc/games/solutions/ is STILL THERE! BUT ... the directories and files won't open there. OK, looks like a dead end. But, wait ...
Still remembered? YES! That site might be a no-go, but the University of Wisconsin Parkside FTP is offline, but the MSDOS/PC Games directory is archived!
Still needed? Depends on what you want. Cracking games isn't like it used to be, where you could do a little hexediting and break the copy protections, but Game FAQs is keeping up and current, saving you from having to call up 1-900-HOT-HINTS. My favorite part is that the ASCII art and layouts live on in 2020.

Apogee Game Site
FTP
"Shareware PC game extravaganza."
Still online? Nope.
Still remembered? Yes, fondly. Well, the games are. The old FTP? Not so much.


Generally Weird Stuff

The Site Which Must Not Be Named
FTP
"Underworld Industries FTP site o' weirdness. Too strange to even get a domain name, this site is only spoken of by its cryptic IP number. Check it out."
Still online? No. I think someone else had the IP in 1996, when I checked it out. Definitely not weirdness, either.
Still remembered? Yes, seen here in High Weirdness by Email from 1992 (?!) and it seems that Underworld Industries expanded into separate "nodes" (archived) in later years.

High Weirdness by E-mail List
FTP
"One of the masterpieces of Net publishing. If you like the list you're reading now, you'll love High Weirdness by E-mail."
Still online? No, sadly.
Still remembered? Yes! I previously linked version 1.1, and here's a copy of version 2.1, 38 pages of oddities that isn't dated. Well, the links are dated, but there's no date. You dig it, right? Anyway, this grew from High Weirdness by Mail, and later evolved into Hyper-Weirdness by Web, but that faded away before being archived. Luckily, the makers of Hyper-Weirdness re-posted some of that weirdness. Also, Rev. Stang shared more/ different/ other High Weirdness by Web.

More Weirdness 
FTP
"Truly demented. From Kibo to the Carbonist Manifesto, this is the site for some of the most mind-warping stuff you'll ever open up in your text editor."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Somewhat. Here's the story behind Spies.com, "one of the first vanity domains in the world" (archived). If this seems familiar, it's because covered some of this before, under Alternative Media.

Net.Weirdness: E-Text and Zines FTP sites and Fonts of All Knowledge

E-Text and Zines FTP sites, and Fonts of All Knowledge, so much to read! Where to begin? At the beginning! (Of this section, that is.)

E-Text/Zines FTP sites

"If you ever get bored with the Net, then you're either a really fast reader or an incurably boring stiff. In case things do start to get a bit dull, there are plenty of places to get new reading material. Try FTP-ing to any of these sites."

Still online? Yes! Well, not really. The best stuff is available via Internet Archive, and [x/y] have digitally dissolved, but we still have Etext! And a few of these ISPs are still around!

• etext.archive.umich.edu (archived) became etext.org, but those files are offline, and the site now points to Internet Archive's copies.
• quartz.rutgers.edu disappeared, but was copied to ... etext, now on Internet Archive.
• http://ftp.msen.com and www.msen.com both display information about "Michigan's Best-Run Internet Service Provider™," and the actual FTP still exists, but not with anonymous access.
• http://ftp.halcyon.com actually works! So does ftp://ftp.halcyon.com! With anonymous access! But ... there's not much in all those folders. Bah.
• world.std.com is another old ISP that's still online, but no FTP.

Still remembered? Yes! Here's a great round-up of ezines from 1994 by johnl (John Labovitz), via the Google Groups archive of alt.answers, in which John warns that the list may be outdated as it hadn't been updated in a month.

"If you're a lucky little monkey with Mosaic or other Web access, you may want to check out the hypermedia linked e-zines."
Still online? No, and not archived, either.
Still remembered? Yes. Here's another copy of a posting from John, in full "hacker" black and green, plus hyperlinks (to dead sites), which captures some reference to the old Northwestern University domain and its ezine archive.


Fonts of All Knowledge

All the FAQ files
FTP
"Sometimes you just gotta know! Well, luckily there are know-it-all freaks out there who are obsessed with collecting answers to your questions."
Still online? No, and not archived.
Still remembered? Yes, on an MIT page that links to (dead) sites you may want to see.
Anything like it? Yes! FAQs.org has USENET FAQs sorted by hierarchy.

Stanford Netnews Newsreading Service
Web
"The Net rodents at Stanford have created one of the coolest services on the Net. Tell them what you're interested in and it'll comb USENET groups and mail you excerpts from articles with the info you need."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Yes, and my favorite source is "All the Dang Search Engines," a very impressive of embedded search engines, from when this was a common thing (well, more common than it is now), and also before Google. Here's their description of what was later renamed SIFT, the Stanford Information Filtering Tool:

"Stanford Netnews Filtering Service (e-mail search service covering net news) Netnews, or USENET News, is a bulletin board system on the Internet. It is organized into discussion groups (called newsgroups) covering a wide variety of topics, e.g., from robotics to video game tips, from food recipes to politics. Its total readership is in millions and daily traffic in tens of MBs. One problem with Netnews is the volume and diversity of information. Our filtering service allows the user to express her interests in finer granularity (using profiles) than newsgroups, and hopefully can provide a better match of interests."

That's right, tens of MBs daily! Consider now in 2017, the average webpage was 3mb, it seems like a much different time.

Alt.Urban.Legends FAQ
 FTP
"Well, my friend knew someone this happened to, so it must be real!" Right. Check the validity of most common urban legends with a brief peek at this expansive FAQ. Do killer tarantulas really inhabit cactus bought at Ikea? Of course they do.
Still online? Yes, but not that FTP. FAQs.org has the alt.folklore.urban five-part FAQ, and there's an archive of UrbanLegends.com, which is a much fancier version of the FAQ.

Interestingly, Snopes.com has been online since 1994 and is still going strong, replacing those old text files traded 'round the net.